Marienbad elettrico – Bastian Schneider

Enrique Vila-Matas, one of the greatest contemporary European writers, in 2015 accepted the offer to spend almost six months in the company of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, a French artist at that time involved in the complex setup of a solo show at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. For Vila-Matas, after The Illogic of Kassel, this was a return to the contemporary art scene. Midway between a diary and a reflection, between an essay and a narrative, Marienbad elettrico is above all a journey of discovery into the mechanisms of creativity. The following text, Bastian Schneider, took the form of a conference/performance held in 2016 in Lisbon: a new creative step within a more than twenty-year artistic collaboration project between Vila-Matas and the French artist. On this occasion, the Spanish writer’s way of producing literature becomes ever more explicit, showing both the bond between each text and the previous one, and his references to the literary tradition. Also on this occasion, Vila-Matas showed himself to be a genuine verbal acrobat.